Steve Donoghue reviews Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman’s How not to write a novel for open letters monthly; to give a flavour of the review, here are the first few paragraphs:
Entirely too many nincompoops write novels, and every one of them who can be discouraged should be discouraged from foisting yet another one on the long-suffering reading public. The Kite Runner, Beasts of No Nation, The Sari Shop, The Perfect Man, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Infinite Jest, Special Topics in Calamity Physics…the ‘Great New Writers’ section of your bookstore’s shelves groan under the weight of wet and lunging fragments that should never have seen daylight, books so otiose with crappy plotting and appalling dialogue that it would be an insult to isolinear hermeneutics even to quip that they appear to be written by a computer algorithm.
No, only human beings could create stuff so bad, and yet each of these monstrosities was carefully, lovingly shepherded through the cutthroat publishing process by a cadre of true believers who considered – who were deluded enough to consider – their charges as fit successors to Thackeray, Fielding, and Austen.
These books – and many, many others like them (the latest unworthy recipient being Joshua Ferris’ sour piece of incoherent gossip, Then We Came to the End) – are unmitigatedly awful and cannot withstand even ten seconds of considered scrutiny. The only reason they’re here and being lionized at the 92nd St. Y is because the majority of the people who praised them and championed them – in addition to the majority of people who started to read them and stopped a quarter of the way through with an immeasurable sense of self-satisfaction – believed they were good novels, that they weren’t, in fact, incomplete self-indulgent gobbets of egregiously, even insultingly, inept prose.
All of these alleged auteurs (not to mention all their credulous readers) could have benefitted from some good old-fashioned schooling in what’s good and what’s bad. They could have benefitted from the post-midnight phone call of that vaguely unseemly mentor who’s seen guiding the paths of more than one future-great writer in the early years of their talent. They could have benefitted, in other words, from some instruction.
This idea is anathema to the ethos of modern writing workshops, of course. As such workshops have proliferated (twenty years ago, there were three in the country; today, no self-respecting local polytechnic institute is without one), and as more and more young writers have achieved financial success on the basis of luck, biographical earnestness, shameless networking, or some combination thereof, it’s become less and less fashionable to tell aspiring authors that there’s a right way and a wrong way to use English prose, that not all innovations are necessarily good…. That their work stands a statistical chance of being just plain bad.
That’s the problem with the act of writing, after all: since everybody can do it, it’s easy to bridle at the thought that not everybody can do it well. It seems a given, like walking. But just watch how some people walk, the next time you’re on a crowded city street. The hugely overweight unwed mother of three? She’s walking entirely on the very back balls of her heels, thereby ripping up her lower calf muscles and putting even more stress on an already-stressed lower back. The slack-jawed, eyebrow-pierced skater dude? His constant deep shuffling – never actually picking his feet up off the pavement – is deforming the bones of his feet and tearing the hell out of his knees. And that’s walking, an act which has, to say the least, fewer complex variables than even the simplest form of writing. And writing fiction is far from the simplest form of writing – it’s the most complex. It stands to reason, then, that most people might not be able to do it well.
I do not know if you have plans of writing a novel, or looking for advice on writing one; but this review is a must-read. Have fun!
Tags: How not to write a novel, Howard Mittelmark, Sandra Newman
